Why Talk about Race

When I engage educators in trainings about educational equity and how we need to consciously deploy different strategies and incorporate various resources to reach all students - specifically African-American students and Latino and Hispanic-American students, but also White students, and Asian-American students - I always face the challenge of how to address race.

The background here is that I believe that we, as educators, deliver instruction based on our strengths and preferences.

• A human being cannot separate culture from lived experience - we can reflect on it, analyze it, and even adapt our cultural understanding and practices - but we never experience life "outside" of culture. The analogy: Culture is to humans as water is to fish!

• The students in front of us enter school already immersed in their own culture, including cultural strengths and preferences.

• Many, many times the students in front of us do not share our strengths and preferences - even when our students are from the same racial and cultural background.
  

• Yet, to reiterate: we approach instruction from our cultural experience, our cultural lens, our strengths and preferences.